Midas had nothing on Apple

There are certain universal rules: birds fly, politicians lie, Apple makes money.

In the last three months of 2014, the company behind the iPad and iPhone increased its profits by 37% to $18-billion - the biggest amount ever recorded by a public company.

In other words, Apple isn't just first among equals. It's first, full stop. Not only is the Cupertino, California, company larger than the five biggest companies on the FTSE 100 combined, it could buy any one of them (or even two or three) with the change in its pocket.

This awesome capitalist success story is mostly based on the fact that Apple is very, very good at making and selling smartphones. The new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus - Apple's first attempt to match the larger screens of its rivals - proved hugely popular, shattering analysts' expectations by selling, on average, 34000 an hour worldwide.

Adjusted for inflation, Apple is not quite the largest company in modern history: that honour goes to '90s-era Microsoft. But it's pretty close.

But its very success raises two intriguing questions. First, can Apple keep the profit coming? And second, is profit all that the company's about?

The purpose of any company is, fundamentally, to increase value for its shareholders but in Silicon Valley that's not enough. To be one of the cool kids you have to have a sense of mission too.

Under Steve Jobs, its charismatic co-founder, Apple certainly had a mission. On returning to the company in 1997, after a 12-year absence, he turned it from being an also-ran into a world-beater by focusing on bringing high-end design to the masses. His devices - the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and then the iPad - not only looked beautiful but worked beautifully.

Tim Cook, who built up Apple's manufacturing operations, has proved a hugely impressive chief executive, doubling the company's size. But his strategy has been to press down on the accelerator, not rethink the road map.

Apple is not only secretive and introverted but relatively cautious. Unlike many of its big Silicon Valley rivals, it does not talk of self-driving cars, or bringing high-speed broadband to every corner of the planet, or going into space, or vanquishing hunger, or conquering death. It merely makes ever-thinner, faster and more desirable devices, locking consumers into an endless and profitable cycle of buy ... envy ... upgrade.

It does not even seem to care particularly about making its devices ubiquitous. Yes, it sells an awful lot of iPhones. But other people, such as Samsung, of Korea and Xiaomi, of China, sell tens of millions too.

What marks Apple out is its profitability. Cook could, if he wanted, take an even bigger share of the global market by lowering his prices. In large part because of the vast economies of scale that Apple's size affords it, its profit margin is an astonishing 39.9%. But he seems perfectly happy to keep the iPhone as a luxury product, secure in the knowledge that its design quality, its brand and the power of its App Store ecosystem will keep users handing over twice what they would pay elsewhere.

The question is: where does Apple go from here?

There's a widespread feeling that the tides of technology are turning against Apple - that its business model sits uncomfortably with the way the web is going. The big idea now is that the internet is disappearing, moving from something accessed on a screen to something embedded into everything around us, with fridges and phones and ovens and televisions and kettles constantly talking to each other in an invisible babble of Wi-Fi signals.

Apple's dominance could be disrupted by new innovators. People are talking glowingly of Xiaomi's new phones, for example. And Apple's control of the music market via the one-two punch of iPod and iTunes is weaker than ever as streaming services such as Spotify, and sites such as YouTube, render its pay-per-song model passé.

But people have been predicting Apple's long-term demise for quite a while.

Trouble is, they failed to take into account that Apple profits from the willingness of people to sacrifice freedom for seamless convenience.